Dead Weight Puzzle
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: Ikuko wonders when she's put it all together, the puzzle that is Hachigo Tohya - or Ushiromiya Battler.


**A/N:** Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c20 - write about gaining an understanding for something

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 **Dead Weight Puzzle**

She wondered how long it was before she put the pieces together. It was inevitable, after all, that she eventually would. She was a mystery author. Putting things together was her specialty and in this case, she had more than enough material to exploit. Even if Tohya hadn't stumbled into her arms (or on the road in front of her car, as it was), she'd still have been able to work out who this amnesic with a love for mystery was.

After all, Ushiromiya Eva didn't have the luxury of having him in her home and she worked it out. She did however have two advantages: she was related to him, and she'd been there at the time of the Rokkenjima incident. She realised she'd never seen him die. She realised the possibility...and lo and behold, she'd solved the same mystery the two of them had unlocked years before.

Because, when she began delving into the Rokkenjima incident (because it was fascinating history stuff), it was inevitable that Tohya's memories would return. She'd confess the purposefulness of that act if asked, but Tohya never asked her. He simply struggled with the ghost that bloomed within him, with the new person he'd become, with the limitations of both body and soul strapped to him. And, finally, he rejected Ushiromiya Battler because that man drowned off the shores of Rokkenjima along with Yasuda Sayo and accepting that he was that man would only kill of Hachigo Tohya as well.

That was his decision to make, in the end, and she only acknowledged it. It wasn't her right to accept, or deny, to question, or to blame. And Ushiromiya Eva was the same. She seemed relived, if nothing else. She entrusted them with her diary and the secrets that even Battler did not know, and then left the Hachigo home and never contacted them again. Ushiromiya Battler disappeared again, and it was only Hachigo Tohya, the mystery plotter and critic.

1998 was the test of those secrets. She met Ushiromiya Ange who sought the truth under her wing and something else she didn't care to admit that was also under her wing. She gave neither to her. Neither were hers to give. Ange walked away that day, head full of ideas from their fabrications but no closer to what she denied. But she was a mystery writer. Of course she'd given enough hints of the truth for Ange to work them out. The first truth, anyway. Nothing hinted at the existence of another Hachigo Tohya, the man who she'd named and whose name she'd borrowed as an alias for the tales that, thanks to him, were finally seeing the light of day. He'd begged for her not to know. 'She'll kill me!' he'd cried, and she'd understood the tragedy of Rokkenjima that had almost led to his own parents killing him was not what he feared at all.

So Ushiromiya Ange walked away from Hachigo Ikuko, using her alias, and was none the wiser about who Hachigo Tohya really was.

Some years after that, Tohya decided he could honour Battler's last wish without killing himself in the process. Or he'd come to a different sort of agreement with himself and peace. Either way, it wasn't her decision to make once again. And she'd milked him for quite a bit. If he chose a different path than the one he was walking down now... that was for him to chose, and her to allow or not as she chose. When he'd thrown himself onto the road, he'd crawled off of his own free will as well. She'd watched him from the window. Or, perhaps, it wasn't his own will then: not Hachigo Tohya, but Ushiromiya Battler, ranting about how he couldn't abandon Ange all over again - and then Tohya again saying how he couldn't bear the thought of seeing her.

He'd found his equilibrium now. Or given up on finding it.

They met. It looked like Ange had figured it out, in the end. With her invitation, perhaps. The tidbit that Hachigo Tohya was in fact a duo, and she'd already met one of them. She pierced it together from that - or, maybe, it was simply hope.

If it was the latter, she would have left that meeting sorely disappointed. It was not a meeting between Ange and Battler, but between Ange and Tohya. And yet, she saw the Battler in her stories, the battler Ushiromiya Ange and Eva had both told her about, rising out of him. They both apologised to her. But it was Battler alone who asked to see her again, and her orphanage.

Ikuko thought she understood the silent conversation that passed between those two siblings right then. She had all the threads, after all. All the secrets. All the tools. But wasn't it a theme in those tales of hers, or of Tohya's more specifically that she'd come to know, that the answer could only be found with love? And there was a love between the two of them that still existed, spidery but stronger than the bond she'd built with him in those monopolosing years.

She wondered when she'd become the Kanon of those stories she'd written with her own hands. She couldn't say Shannon because Shannon was a far more complicated tale, and in any case she'd only fallen in love once and that once was an impossibility. It was one of the first puzzles she'd solved: where Hachigo Tohya's heart lay and it in the Golden Land with Beatrice, the Eternal Witch - was at the bottom of the ocean with Yasuda Sayo. And as much as he tried, Hachigo Tohya was Ushiromiya Battler and Ushiromiya Battler had already given up his heart and soul and they were in a place she wouldn't be able to retract them from.

The puzzle that she'd been left with was the rest of his broken form, and a mix of wistful thinking, morbid fascination and a genuine friendship had led her to continue her exploration. Because she could have done it secretly, in her basement where the wheels of his chair wouldn't go. She could have let him live in an ignorance where the pain in his head could fade into his memories like as stubborn migraine and nothing more, where he wouldn't argue with himself and his own identity, where he wouldn't scare the life out of her powerless self by throwing himself onto the road - because she'd already promised not to interfere with the choices of his life, and that had been before she'd put the pieces together.

No, that wasn't quite right. She was a piece short, still. That piece Ushiromiya Ange still held, or Fukin Orhpanage. Something Ange, as the current benefactor of that orphanage, knew. Something Battler, subconsciously or otherwise, knew. She's almost frightened to go and take him there, and that wasn't a mark of a mystery fan at all. The Fukin Orphanage had become a cat box so of course she needed to go and open it and find out the truth for herself.

It's too late when the cat box opens though...and she wonders when she pieced its contents together as well, to be able to wheel the dead weight that was Hachigo Tohya home.


End file.
